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Mike Pence: GOP will keep promise to repeal Obamacare - CNNPolitics.comJan. 4, 2017
Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Wednesday that repealing the Affordable Care Act was part of keeping promises Republicans -- including President-elect Donald Trump -- made on the campaign trail.
"Make no mistake about it," Pence told reporters after meeting with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill. "We're going to keep our promise to the American people -- we're going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with solutions that lower the cost of health insurance without growing the size of government."
Trump promised to replace Ocare with something better. Anyone can lower the cost of health insurance, if you offer less coverage. Let the insurance companies deny those with pre-existing conditions, kick poor folks off of health insurance and let them die earlier than technology would allow.
The Republicans will be the Death Panel.
Medical Ethics dictates that it is wrong to deny life saving treatment over the ability to pay.
VM -- , Apr 11 ... Virtual MentorDecisions regarding the allocation of limited medical resources among patients should consider only ethically appropriate criteria relating to medical need. These criteria include likelihood of benefit, urgency of need, change in quality of life, duration of benefit, and, in some cases, the amount of resources required for successful treatment. In general, only very substantial differences among patients are ethically relevant; the greater the disparities, the more justified the use of these criteria becomes. In making quality of life judgments, patients should first be prioritized so that death or extremely poor outcomes are avoided; then, patients should be prioritized according to change in quality of life, but only when there are very substantial differences among patients. Non-medical criteria, such as ability to pay, age, social worth, should not be considered.
That is the reason that President Reagan signed a bill to end the practice of hospitals not accepting patients in emergency situations if they may not have the ability to pay.
April 5, 2011
It was called "dumping." Very simply, prior to the implementation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986, a patient coming into a hospital emergency department often had no right to treatment or even evaluation, no matter how dire his or her condition. If patients could not prove that they had the resources to pay for care, they could be turned away or sent elsewhere—sometimes in a taxi, or on foot. They often suffered adverse health consequences and sometimes they died.
"Indefensible" is an appropriate term. Ron Anderson, M.D., CEO of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, was the director of the emergency department at Parkland in the 1980s, and he knew all about dumping. "I would see patients transferred with knives still in their backs, or women giving birth at the door of the hospital, simply because they were uninsured."
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Parkland recorded calls from transferring hospitals. In one, a physician said he wanted to transfer a woman with heart failure who was in the ICU. When the Parkland physician asked for more information, the other physician replied, "She does not have any insurance, the hospital does not want to take care of her, OK? This is a private, capitalistic, money-making hospital"
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EMTALA represented the first time that anyone other than prison inmates gained an affirmative right to treatment. "Before EMTALA, patients only had rights if they were already in care in hospitals. They had the right to refuse treatment, the right to change physicians, and the right to walk away, but they had no right to care in the first place. This was the first recognition of a patient's general legal right to receive health care,".
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Mariner concludes, "EMTALA changed the baseline. It changed the expectations of both patients and physicians, and the concept of what people are entitled to."
And from Anderson, who fought so hard and for so long to do something about the dumping: "I think getting EMTALA passed may be the most important thing we ever did. It was and is a moral imperative."
How EMTALA Transformed Health Care - Hospitals and Health Networks